White Fragility.

I tend to pound the issue. And joke about any alleged subtlety, for which I thank you as it was well-intended.

 

I fondly recall the 1960s in their entirety. All those bombings out in California. The Weathermen. Black Panthers. The writer Robert Heinlein described our era as the crazy years. I'd have to look it up when he said it but that surely describes the 1960s, and, increasingly, the new 20s.

 

I would, in a hot minute and I'm fairly well off though not wealthy. A hundred mill? I'd never see the the USA again, of course

I wouldn't do it for a million though, which I guess proves his point.

 

The Crazy Years describes any time, depending on who you ask. Some people made fortunes in the depths of the Depression and others lost everything in the "Roaring" prosperity of the 1920s

Heinlein is one of the truly great philosophical writers but just for that reason he's not that good as a historical source. He won a Hugo for the standard depiction of militarist fascism in Science fiction and the very next year won another for the literal handbook of the Hippie movement. "Specialization is for insects" as he once said.

 

Or a point about you.

 

The one thing that isn’t equal

 

So children?

 

No. The one thing that is different between person a and person b.

 

Yeah that could be age weight hair color propensity for soon cancer, desire to eat sushi.

We have lots of differences what the hell are you talking about?

 

Good job. It could be those. If that’s the independent variable. That should be the only meaningful difference between two cases.

 

Nothing is independent it's all dependent on them being human.

 

I don’t even want to know how you think science works. Did you ever do an experiment in science class? It assumes all else being equal.

 

I asked you what isn't equal, you played games so I assume nothing.

 

You just claimed “nothing is independent” to a basic scientific literacy check. That says more about you. You assume a lot of things about the way the world works. Now you want me to explain empirical findings, when you don’t get the basic ideas of how to find said empirical findings? How do I know if I gave you an answer you could read it?

 

so what's independent?

 

Sorry, late to this thread, and read it all, but still not sure I understand what White Fragility really is. LOL
Anyhow, not uncomfortable talking racism here.

1. I agree, except that I would expand upon that and say that anyone can be a racist, this is not just a club for white folks. Although in general, in today's age, I think the amount of racists in all populations is a small faction.

2. I am a proponent of all lives matter. That includes black lives. Even those that are killed by other blacks. I think this is the big disconnect here. The BLM movement is silent when a 3 year old child is killed here in Chicago over the weekend, absolutely terrible tragedy, and as a parent, I cannot even comprehend what that would do to me. And nothing from BLM. They are hyperfocused on black men killed by white police. It is claimed that BLM is for everyone, but their actions do not show this. White folks are also killed by police, about twice as many as black, and yet nothing is ever mentioned about this. They don't even make the news. Why? In fact, if you don't look for statistics, you would think that whites are never killed by police and only blacks are thanks to the media today. As far as the 12 year old boy with the toy gun, that is a terrible tragedy. That toy looks very much like a real gun, and frankly, toys should not be made as such. In order to assess that correctly, you have to put yourself in the officers shoes. If that kid has a real gun, there is a decent chance you don't go home to your family, ever again. Or someone else gets shot. The same thing would have happened had the child been white.

3. All I can say here is that there is only 1 obstacle that keeps you from moving ahead in this country. In order to figure out what that is, you have to look in the mirror. Moving ahead, or not, is an individual choice. I grew up dirt poor. Father passed when I was 9. Mom raised the last 3 of us (youngest of 6) working as a cashier at Penneys. Not much income to go around. Took me a while to figure it out, basically spent my 20's as a punk, blaming my problems on the world. Once I figured out that if I applied myself, I could do better. Not all my siblings figured that out, yet to this day, and we're all old now. Of course we acknowledge the past was terrible, with slavery and Jim Crow. But that is over now, and does not prevent anyone from doing anything. I'm not sure what acknowledging the past has to do with now? In fact, with affirmative action in place, the system is primed to help.

 

I wonder how my white skin helped me study at the local library, next to several brown and black skinned young adults who were studying similar subjects.

I wonder how my white skin helped me audit college level classes*, along with a couple of those same young adults, and afterward we would go for sodas.

I wonder how my white skin helped me when I competed against one of my brown skinned friends for the same job, which they got. (they later hired me as an assistant) and as we grew and learned more, I headed off to greener pastures. Our friendship remains.

* local college permitted non-enrolled persons to audit (sit in) 6 classes per semester. It was a well known secret, passed around at the library.

The color of someone's skin is the least counted aspect when it comes to someone wanting to learn. Talk to educators- they look for and cultivate those with a desire to improve and learn. Most employers are the same.

 

Even most people on the left are mocking DiAngelo today. Your opinion is in an extreme minority, and I'm not talking about minority skin color.

She's likely to get cancelled soon, by her own leftist culture, but the wealthy corporatist collective loves her so maybe they'll keep funding her division of the races.

 

I'm going to issue a rewrite here without reference to 1930's Germany. A newspaper editor friend of mine told me he agreed with my points but some Jewish readers might be put off. The rewrite:


An obnoxious and dangerous racist manual is making the rounds as a bestseller during these turbulent times. “White Fragility” is a book written by white professor and corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo. It accuses America’s whites of inherited unapologetic racism. The book is the epitome of gaslighting indoctrination. People with pale complexions must now contend with a new wave of groupthink that is essentially a mob that is coming for them. There is no place to run and no place to hide from being criminally white.

The Black Lives Matter movement is erupting into a powerful political party and US corporations are filled with consternation at the mere thought of national boycotts, domestic terror attacks and anything that even looks like bad publicity. Diangelo’s book is likely to end up as required reading at company seminars and may even be imposed on students beginning in elementary school.

America, particularly aging white America, is now presented as dangerous and irreparably unrepentant, too obstinate to submit to the amateur pseudo sociology of a non-sociologist. Diangelo is out there spearheading an effort to erode the resistance of the accused with the burden of White Guilt and the contrived sin of White Privilege. The book is a smokescreen to explain away the failures of the War on Poverty and the Great society.

The deterioration of black family structure was warned against in 1965 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an actual sociologist, and democratic US senator. Moynihan acknowledged slavery as a significant contributing factor in black history, but he warned using welfare payments to remove male authority figures from black homes would exacerbate poverty outcomes irrespective of societal racism.

America never said black lives don’t matter; those words were placed in mouths by people like Diangelo who surf the waves of movements for fame and fortune. “White Fragility” is an unwinnable trial by ordeal so innocent citizens will get spirit-killing re-education brainwashing that is more like something from the People’s Temple or the Branch Davidians than any serious forensic examination of Black problems in America.

Americans cannot afford to stay asleep at the wheel for much longer even if they mean well. With people like Diangelo out there it won’t take long for educationally and politically incited throngs to come for them and their children. Today it’s monuments and attacks on social order, tomorrow it’s your home. White Fragility is a de facto racist handbook for the left.

 

Well, it is real in a sense, but you have to accept Ms DiAngelo's definition of racism which is not the long accepted definition. White people who deny they are racist because they don't believe blacks are inferior are "fragile" in DiAngelo's eyes.

DiAngelo's definition is a racist is a white person who grew up in the USA.

So in another sense "white fragility" is a parlor trick, a species of intellectual ju-jitsu. But it only works if you can get a white person feeling guilty enough.

 

You can say "hypocrite" as often as you'd like. Not all of "we" are going to join you.

Many of the people who praise MLK do have an interest in judging people by the content of their character. There is a flip-side to your coin.

Four years before MLK's assassination the Civil Rights Act passed the House, then flew through the Senate.
63% of Democrats voted "yes"; 37% voted "no".
80% of Republicans voter "yes", 20% voted "no"

Because Democrats held an overwhelming majority of the House the overall "yes" voters were 70%. If you assume that House Representatives voted on behalf of the voter majority in their districts, then you may infer that 70% of Americans saw MLK as a hero, or at least agreed with his views that we should all be treated equally. That was 56 years ago. The vote today would be 100%. We've come a long way in half a century.

The "white fragility" and BLM movements are actively trying to undo decades of progress toward a multicultural society which lives and works together in harmony and take us backwards to a race-based and segregated country. That's not "progress".

 

What we’re testing for. In this case race.

 

Thank you for your honesty.

 

This poor horse is dead, but people insist on beating him. Poor horse.

 

Your White skin helps you avoid the problems that people of color face simply because they are people of color. Does that answer your question?